N.Y. COLLECTOR TRIES TO KEEP CIGAR-STORE INDIANS ALIVE

NEW YORK -- Wearing feather headdresses and grim expressions, cigar-store Indians were once familiar on the sidewalks of Manhattan.

Today, they and the stores they advertised have mostly vanished, but one man is doing his best to be sure that, one way or another, they will endure.

He is Mark Goldman, who runs the House of Oxford, on Fifth Avenue at 22nd Street. He said he believes that his is the only store in New York City that sells nothing but cigars and reproductions of cigar-store Indians.

Goldman has also crowded his home with cigar-store figures.

Eighteen of them, all valuable antiques, line the walls of the five-room apartment that he shares with his fiancee, Laura Liebowitz, in a brownstone in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

"Every time he brings one home I ask him, 'Now where are you going to put that?"' Liebowitz said. "He's done very well. He always finds room. He throws out the furniture."

"I have my priorities," Goldman said.

He bought his first Indian almost on a whim in 1970, when he heard that one was for sale at an auction in South Carolina.

Just 21 years old, he had recently inherited the House of Oxford from his father, and thought the statue would add the right touch.

He hides that figure behind the loft stairs in his bedroom. "It's only 50 years old; it's not a very good piece," he said. "But I've never thought of selling it. Somehow it's always traveled with me. Some people take their childhood dolls with them; I take my Indians."

Most of the pieces in his home are from the late 19th century, the heyday of cigar-store figures, and are worth $10,000 to $50,000 each.

Carved signs like these date to the 17th century. They were used in Europe to signal the presence of a tobacco shop to a semiliterate populace.

The earliest statues depicted young black men dressed in feathers, reflecting the European conception of American Indians.

Later, carvers produced diverse figures.

Indians were most common, but minstrels, policemen, politicians and cowboys also appeared on store doorsteps.

They could be unnervingly realistic.

One of Goldman's favorites, for example, is a tall warrior, dating from around 1895, in a corner of the parlor. A few feathers decorate his hair, his eyes are large and gloomy and he clutches a knife and a tomahawk.

Liebowitz complained that the figure "can be a little creepy, especially at night," but Goldman described it as "very dynamic."

He also has a soft spot for a figure of an Indian woman in the living room, carved around 1890 by a French Canadian artisan named Louis Jobin. Carvers almost never signed their works, but Jobin's style is easily identifiable.

The young woman wears a headband and a cape, and her sweet, round face gazes heavenward.

"She looks like a saint," Goldman said. No surprise; Jobin also carved statues for churches.

Goldman's collection includes a kilted Highlander from the 1890s and a turn-of-the-century Puck wearing a pointy cap with a pompon.

Two Turks with handlebar mustaches and turbans once advertised shops carrying Turkish tobacco.

Today, cigar-store figures belong mainly to collectors like Goldman and to museums.

"It's hard to find these things anymore, at any price," he said. He advertises for them in a weekly London antiques newspaper, and he has searched for them in England, California, Texas and Pennsylvania.

He usually returns from such trips empty-handed because the pieces are so costly or so poorly restored.

So he concentrates on collecting jukeboxes and carousel animals ("I like big things," he said).

But he still buys cigar-store statues, all reproductions, for his shop.

He displays them in his windows and he sells them for $250 to $1,500 each.

He became a seller quite by chance 10 years ago, when a California novelty importer offered him a batch of carvings from Taiwan.

"They were horrible," Goldman said. "They were the Taiwanese version of what American Indians looked like, with oversized faces like old Chinese dolls. But they all sold."

He then commissioned a shipment from a carver of religious statues in Ecuador.

"The guys at customs figured that these things were so ugly nobody would buy them, that we had to be smuggling drugs inside," Goldman said. "They drilled holes in all of them. I sold those too, but I gave a discount on them."

Most of his carvings today come from D.K. Christen, of Youngstown, Fla., and his son, who lives in New Mexico.

Deliveries arrive every few months, with the brightly painted figures standing up, tied together in the back of a flatbed truck like a crowd of prisoners.

"You'd be surprised how many people buy them," Goldman said. "Restaurant owners; decorators; people who want a present for their father who smokes. I think everybody should have one."